Pete Ashdown’s Journal

Jamie Gadette (and an uncredited Shane Johnson) has written an article about my “open source” campaign in this week’s Salt Lake City Weekly.

The Salt Lake Tribune quotes me on what makes a good password.

Finally, Matthew Reinbold interviews me on technology, copyright, and DRM issues on the Muted Noise website.

I’ve spent the past two days attending the Broadband Cities conference. The focus was on metropolitan networks, mainly fiber, but also touching on wireless. Yesterday, I heard an excellent speech by the economist W. Brian Arthur and today Larry Lessig spoke.

Broadband Cities is an independent organization, but the reason they held this year’s conference in Utah was due to the rollout of the UTOPIA fiber network. I lobbied hard in favor of UTOPIA, both to the legislature regarding SB66 and to the Salt Lake City Mayor and City Council. It was no coincidence the conference was held in West Valley City, a participating UTOPIA city, rather than Salt Lake City which withdrew its support. A few of the council members are up for reelection this fall. If you wanted UTOPIA and reside in Salt Lake, you may be interested how they voted.

UTOPIA was restricted by the legislature and stopped in Salt Lake City by the forces who believe the free-market rules all. Many of these same legislators turned around the next year and came up with HB260, which imposed additional regulation on Internet Service Providers and is now being constitutionally challenged. So where does the free-market rule? It must be only where an entity has enough resources to change the rules.

The march towards privatizing and deregulating everything is where I depart with my Libertarian friends. The free-market only works if there is robust competition. The “invisible hand” becomes “invisible clothes” when you start looking at infrastructure, health care, and energy. If the market is dominated by a powerful entity or if entry is cost-impossible, then how does competition have a chance? In fact it doesn’t and guess who suffers?

Arthur emphasized and Lessig touched on the idea that there is a role for government in markets. I say not merely in fostering competition but also where there is a societal benefit. Free-marketeers decry any municipal participation in peoples’ lives as socialism, but that is answering the argument with an extreme. If pure capitalism has brought us Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and a #16th ranking in worldwide broadband deployment, it is time for the pendulum to swing towards a more active role of government.

When a free-marketeer presents Amtrak as an example of government waste, I have to wonder what they think of the Interstate Highway System. This is also a government program and the cost has been in the trillions. Toll roads with electronic payment systems may have their place, but where would the United States be if Eisenhower had decided to wait for private enterprise to build the highway system? It is the same place we are headed because of the endless wail for privatizing everything in the past 30 years. Commercial healthcare has not brought us universal coverage. Commercial energy has lowered standards but not price. Commercial transportation needs bailout after bailout. America continues to suffer under this delusion.

Our country is more connected if it has effective broadband and a fast transportation system that covers all cities and towns. Americans are happier if they are healthy and not worrying about the cost of going to the hospital. Energy independence will make us safer and charge our economy.

We need leadership that isn’t bowing to the failed ideologies of the past quarter century.

Since I received 2000 stickers at the end of July, the campaign has burned through them quickly. Getting promotional materials out and about is a priority, but a costly drain. The stickers were 30 cents a piece. Having signs printed runs anywhere from $3 on up, depending on colors and design. I’ve got a strategy in regards to sign cost which may work out well. More on that as it plays out. If anyone has a good lead on vinyl sticker printers that can do custom die-cut work, I’d appreciate an email.

I talked to someone last year who had a hand in promotional materials for a campaign. She expressed the extreme cost in printing shirts with dubious promotional value. I asked her if she kept her shirts from the campaign, “Oh yeah, I wash my car with them.” If this campaign had money to waste, it might waste money on shirts. Rather the Internet has provided a nice solution in Cafe Press.

Cafe Press provides an outlet for a wide array of campaign junk. I put this shop together with no markup, so the campaign doesn’t see any profit from the items contained within. Besides, I’m not sure how the FEC would handle that anyway, so profit would be more trouble than it is worth. Frankly, I’ll be very impressed if any of the mugs sell. Mugs have to be the most overused promotional item ever. They sprout like mushrooms in my XMission office. Whenever I visit Deseret Industries, I enjoy perusing the discarded schwag museum. There are usually enough mugs to supply an army with coffee.

Don’t be shy about submitting designs. Put them in the Wiki in a preferably large format (2000×2000) PNG and I’ll toss them into the Cafe Press store.

On Tuesdays, I try to attend my local Rotary Club. I was inducted almost a year ago and I’ve grown to hold the organization dear to my heart. Initially, I thought it was simply a business networking club, but membership has taught me the amazing good that Rotary does not only in communities, but nationally and internationally. Rotary’s motto sums it up best, “Service Before Self.”

Each week, Rotary has a luncheon with an invited speaker. These speakers are usually informative and inspirational. I’ve seen everyone from the head of the Utah National Guard speak to representatives from Doctors Without Borders. Yesterday, Tom Holmoe, the director of BYU Athletics was the speaker. He introduced his talk with scripture from Proverbs.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

This is a portion of the actual proverb, the full text is, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” (Proverbs 29:18). The message remains the same.

I have a hard time seeing any vision in our federal government. The recent energy bill is a good example of this. Rather than pushing for a national effort towards clean and plentiful energy, our government wanders the room like a drunk looking for leftovers in bottles. The best example of this is a $5 Billion Loan to China to fund new nuclear reactors. The reason our representatives give for this? Well, if China has more nuclear reactors, they’ll use less oil. In other words, if you send your neighbors on an all-expenses-paid vacation, there will be more crack in the neighborhood for you.

I challenge anyone of any political persuasion to stand back and admire the utter awesomeness of this legislation. What is even more special about this is that the fact that the Chinese have been buying significant amounts of U.S. Treasury Bonds, which is another way of saying they’re financing our debt. So we’re borrowing money and loaning it back to them, so they can take steps towards oil independence.

That is what I call a lack of vision.

In the late 80’s, I had a job doing data entry for LDS Hospital. This consisted of wearing a dress-shirt and dress-pants while sitting in a darkened room entering billing records into a terminal. It was an evening shift so I could attend the University during the day. My boss didn’t mind me taking personal calls, so periodically my friends would call and keep me company. One call sticks out in my memory.

“They’re tearing down the wall,” my friend Ryan called. Ryan was a brilliant Apple ][ programmer who later went on to become an eye surgeon.

“What wall?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The Berlin Wall.”

We were witnessing one of the most defining moments of the 20th century. Up until that point, I had always lived with the specter of the Soviet Union in my life. That night the regime that one thought would always be on the other side of the global chess board began to crumble.

Although the Berlin Wall was a symbol of so much more, in retrospect, I see an interesting metaphor. Many walls fell in the 1990’s. Apple introduced the Macintosh and Laser Printer and broke down the walls of printing and publishing. The Sundance Film Festival in Utah became a launching pad for many successful films made with a budget of what could be scraped off credit cards. Then the Internet became commonplace and suddenly anyone could be their own music distributor, news reporter, or international business. These barriers and others have fallen to the benefit of humanity.

In my view, one prominent wall remains, the wall between leaders and the people, the wall that I have been trying to scale for nearly a year.

When I started seriously considering this campaign, I sat down with the XMission staff and shared my thoughts. One wish I expressed was that I wouldn’t fall into the same pattern as many campaigns I have seen; ideas sacrificed on the alter of fund raising, every opportunity to meet people turned into an opportunity to ask for cash, candidates being forced to grovel before people with money in the hope that some of it would come their way. At that October meeting I told my staff that if I was going to run, raising money would not be my primary concern. Time would be the most valuable contribution people could give me. In an effort to model my campaign after the “Open Source” software movement, anyone could contribute at any time.

That ideal was lost. After six months of full-time work, I find myself in the same kitchen in which Democratic challengers have been for the past forty years, following the same recipe. These individuals were committed to their cause, passionate about their work, and nearly all of them raised around $200,000 and hit the end. Momentum raises money, but sadly, money buys momentum. Two candidates I talked to told me that they had no money to buy television commercials and were steam-rollered by the competition who had millions.

Nevertheless, I refuse to to self-finance this campaign in an effort to somehow portray myself as immune from the influence of money. This would only be self-serving and do nothing towards solving the problem. Even though I am a successful businessman who has reinvested back into the community, self-financing would go against the fundamentals of what I am trying to change. Instead of career politicians, attorneys, and millionaires dominating our government, we need citizens like school teachers, scientists, firemen, and mothers. Our desired form of government is a republic, but without broad representation it is merely an oligarchy.

I have resisted using the Internet to its full extent for fear of revealing too much strategy, giving too much away, or stumbling over my own words and saying the wrong thing. This paralysis began to creep into my daily life, turning me into the wooden man afraid to be himself. I will not continue that charade.

“Open Source” at its core means transparency and collaboration. It is a powerful concept that has far reaching implications for society in our future. This campaign will reach for that ideal. One of the most impressive works on the Internet today is the Wikipedia, a completely free, open, and collaborative encyclopedia. I have contributed to and edited the Wikipedia and so can you, so can anyone, right now and without permission. Inspired by what they have done, I have installed their MediaWiki software on my website. If you want to volunteer, here is a good way to start. Together we can craft policy, strategize, and reach out to others.

I have also started a full-blown journal (yes, “blog”) into which I will work to put my thoughts and experiences on a daily basis. Discourse is the foundation of Democracy and this campaign will not be a platform to lecture my constituents. Leave your comments, trackback, and participate.

I look forward to this experiment and I hope you will join me.

“You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher”
- Peter Gabriel